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  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1. Anbar Province, Iraq

  2. Nightclub Royalty in the Shadow of the Bomb

  3. The New York Times, the Token

  4. The Washington Bureau

  5. Becoming a “Timesman”

  6. Egypt: Foreign Correspondent

  7. From the Nile to the Seine

  8. “Be Careful What You Wish For”: Washington News Editor

  9. The Gulf War

  10. Terror in Tiny Packages

  11. Al Qaeda

  12. Ashes and Anthrax: The Shadow of 9/11

  13. The Defector

  14. Phase 2: Iraq

  15. “Where’s Waldo?” The Hunt for WMD in Iraq

  16. The Revolt

  17. The War Within

  18. Correcting the Record

  19. Scapegoat

  20. Protecting Sources

  21. Inmate 45570083

  22. Departures

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About Judith Miller

  Notes

  Index

  For friends, fellow journalists killed while telling the story:

  Dial Torgerson

  David Blundy

  Daniel Pearl

  Marie Colvin

  And for Bill Safire, word warrior, who encouraged me to keep trying

  PROLOGUE

  I thought I was doing well. In the spring of 2002, a year before the invasion of Iraq, I was at the peak of my profession. A member of an investigative unit at the New York Times, America’s most prestigious newspaper, I had been part of a small team that had just won a Pulitzer for our investigation before 9/11 into Al Qaeda and its growing threat to America. I had also received an Emmy that year, for a documentary based on Germs, a book I had written with Stephen Engelberg and William Broad, two respected Times colleagues. I had finally been lucky in love. For the past nine years I had been married to a brilliant publisher, a legend in his own profession, who was proud of my work and tolerated my frequent lengthy assignments often to dangerous places, especially in the Middle East, where I had been the paper’s Cairo bureau chief for several years.

  I could not have imagined that three years later my reporting would be mired in controversy, or that some of my life-long assumptions about politics, foreign policy, and journalism would be tested and shattered.

  At the start of the Iraq War in 2003, I was sent to cover it as the only reporter embedded in a secret army unit charged with finding the weapons of mass destruction that the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies concluded Saddam Hussein was hiding. Before and during the war, it was my job to report in the most timely way on what the US government believed to be true. It sounds easy. In the hypersecretive world of national security, it isn’t.

  The CIA and other intelligence agencies were convinced with “high confidence” that Saddam had chemical and germ weapons programs and was actively seeking a nuclear bomb. I got scoops about some of that intelligence. I hedged the assertions with all the proper qualifiers. Eventually, over the course of America’s long occupation of Iraq, more than six thousand chemical weapons or remnants of them—some containing mustard gas and sarin made before the 1991 war—were found and tragically sickened some American soldiers and Iraqis. While the Times and other news outlets claimed that these were not the weapons for which America had invaded, Saddam’s failure to acknowledge or account for them violated his pledges to the United Nations and was part of the administration’s justification for war.

  But the central, clearly newsworthy claim of some of my prewar stories was wrong. As we now know, Saddam did not have an active program to create and use WMD or stockpiles of such new, sophisticated weapons. The faulty intelligence on which the decisions of policy makers and politicians were based was used to justify a war whose consequences have thus far proven disastrous for the Iraqi people and America.

  As the war began to go badly, controversy erupted not only over the government’s missteps but also the media’s role in publicizing the government’s estimates, and my reporting, in particular. From a journalist whose boss, Bill Keller, once described as “smart, relentless, incredibly well sourced, and fearless,” I was suddenly being characterized as a pushy woman reporter who would do anything for a scoop, a warmonger who had helped sell and carry out the war.

  A campaign against my reporting had been launched in the blogosphere by critics, some of whom have no idea what reporting involves; I sensed that they were reacting to the ill-fated war. But the false characterizations still stung. I often didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. (I did a bit of both.) Accusations that I was a closet neocon or the most gullible reporter the Times had ever hired quickly migrated from internet columns to ideologically linked journals, then to the so-called mainstream media, and soon reverberated throughout the global electronic universe. The accusations popped up in books by celebrated pundits, almost none of whom called me for comment; in scholarly works on journalistic ethics; and even in a book on “irresponsible work” by a Harvard professor.1

  On WMD in Iraq, I had lots of company in government and the media. In hindsight, few of the officials whose decisions prompted the mess in Iraq understood what they were getting into—not those in 1991 who favored leaving Saddam in power, or those in 2003 who sought to bring democracy to Iraq by force. Wrong, too, were those who argued in 2007 as the war was failing that switching strategies and a “surge” of forces in Iraq would not affect America’s military fortunes there. So were those who claimed that America had finally “won” in Iraq, and those in 2010 who advocated pulling our troops out posthaste.

  There is no shortage of mistakes about Iraq. Good grace, and honesty, require all of us who made them to admit error. This book is part of that process.

  Over time questions about the rightness of the Iraq War both in its conception and outcome morphed in some quarters into a broad condemnation of the media and accusations that the press—not the government—had taken the country to war. The charge was both untrue and toxic to our political discourse. But with newspapers under increasing economic pressure, the charges of warmongering felt like mortal threats to an institution and a profession to which I had devoted my life.

  It was into this landscape that a federal investigation was launched to determine who had leaked the name of a CIA agent whose husband had accused the White House of having lied about Iraq’s WMD. I received a federal subpoena demanding that I disclose the identity of sources who may have blown the agent’s cover. I went to jail to protect those sources, or so I thought.

  When the officials and weapons experts finally determined that there were no WMD stockpiles and active programs to make them to be found in Iraq, I was shocked and angry. But I thought I knew why the CIA and other intelligence agencies made some of their mistaken assumptions and reached the wrong conclusions. I believed it was my responsibility to report this. The Times did not permit me to do so, and soon after I got out of jail, I felt I had no choice but to resign.

  For years afterward, friends urged me to write about this tumultuous period. I hesitated. The entire episode was still too painful and confusing. But eventually, I concluded that I had to try. When journalists make mistakes about an event—or a person—we must revisit our work to report new, contradictory information or fill in the contours or holes in an incomplete story. I wrote this book because I believe that the forces that playe
d substantial roles in my personal experience—a government that aggressively hides the truth from the public and prosecutes reporters, the collapse of the flawed but still invaluable temples of twentieth-century American journalism, and the very real threats that emanate from a part of the world that understandably frightens and exhausts us—are continuing to drive the deeply troubling decline in the quality of information available to both policy makers and the public.

  I take tremendous pride in being good at my job. Correcting and completing the record are part of the pact that journalists make with readers. The book is my effort, finally, to fulfill the last of my end of that bargain.

  — CHAPTER 1 —

  ANBAR PROVINCE, IRAQ

  Late July 2010

  As I opened the door of my flimsy CHU, the “compartmentalized housing unit” at Camp Ramadi in the Iraqi desert where I had slept after arriving from Baghdad, a gust of wind covered me with sand. The thermometer on the trailer door registered 100. It was six in the morning.

  “Welcome to Spa Ramadi!” Maj. Ryan Cutchin said.

  Tall, sandy haired, and army fit, Ryan loved mornings. Twenty years a soldier, he had probably been out for a run.

  Summer was an insane time to visit Iraq. But I wanted to report on the US military’s withdrawal before Ryan finished his final deployment here, his third in seven years. America’s war in Iraq was ending. Soldiers like Ryan were leaving in what military spokesmen insisted on calling a “responsible drawdown of forces.” President George W. Bush had established the withdrawal schedule by December 2011. President Barack Obama was implementing it rigorously.

  When we had first met seven years earlier in March 2003, then Captain Cutchin was serving in the 75th Field Artillery Brigade in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The brigade had been charged with finding WMDs in Iraq. Embedded for the New York Times, I was the only reporter with his then-secret brigade, known as the 75th Exploitation Task Force. The XTF, as it was called, would find only traces of the weapons that the CIA and fifteen other American intelligence agencies had concluded Saddam Hussein was hiding, a nightmarish cache that the soldiers searching for them (and I with them) were convinced existed: remnants of some 500 tons of mustard and nerve gas, 25,000 liters of liquid anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 29,984 prohibited munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, several dozen Scud missiles, and 18 mobile biological weapons vans—not to mention its ambitious nuclear weapons program, according to US estimates based on United Nations reports of what Iraq had made and claimed to have destroyed.1 My bond with Ryan and other XTF members, forged during that often frustrating, infuriating, ultimately fruitless four-month search, had endured.

  “We were so sure we’d find WMDs! Any day now,” Ryan recalled, as we sipped coffee in the ice-cold trailer housing the Green Bean cafeteria, one of the few private contractors left at the forsaken army base on the outskirts of Anbar Province, a Sunni Muslim stronghold sixty miles west of Baghdad.

  Neither of us would ever forget that maddening hunt, or the faulty intelligence that had helped justify the war, some of which I had been the first to report. When the war had begun, I accompanied Ryan and other XTF members day after exhausting day—inspecting sites on a list of more than eight hundred suspect places that the intelligence agencies had identified based on the outdated reports of UN inspectors. Most of those sites had been heavily looted by the time we arrived. At one villa in Baghdad, soldiers found a singed fifteen-page list of Iraqi front companies and individuals authorized to buy dual-use equipment in Europe and Asia suitable for conventional or unconventional weapons. The list and other weapons-related documents were smoldering in an old metal steamer trunk when the soldiers arrived. The contents had been set on fire—we never learned by whom. Tewfik Boulenouar, the unit’s Algerian-born translator, had salvaged some pages by stamping out the fire with his boot. Most of the time, intelligence about what was stored where were stunningly wrong.

  “Remember those packets we got each morning, with the glossy pictures and a tentative grid?” Ryan reminisced. “Go to this place. You’ll find a McDonald’s there. Look in the fridge. You’ll find French fries, cheeseburger, and Cokes. Then we would get there, and not only was there no fridge and no fries, there hadn’t even been a thought of putting a McDonald’s there.”

  One day in mid-April 2003, Ryan had raced to the city of Bayji, 130 miles north of Baghdad, to inspect a dozen fifty-five-gallon drums in an open field that soldiers had unearthed. The Iraqis buried everything of even remotely potential value, which increased suspicions about them among US intelligence agencies. Ryan, who led Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) Bravo, was told that one of the drums had tested positive for cyclosarin, a deadly nerve agent. “It turned out to be gasoline,” he recalled. On another trip, his soldiers had dug up a crate containing a sofa.

  In late May 2003 Ryan’s friend, Chief Warrant Officer Richard “Monty” Gonzales, the head of search team MET Alpha, was sent to Basra in southern Iraq to investigate what senior weapons experts had described as nuclear equipment. What they found were industrial-scale vegetable steamers. The contents of the crates had all been clearly marked—in Russian.2

  By the time their deployment and my embed ended in June 2003, the soldiers who had tried to remain optimistic about their mission were bitter. After promising leads had fizzled and Iraqi weapons scientists who had cooperated with the XTF were turned over to the Iraq Survey Group (the XTF’s larger successor), Ryan Cutchin, Monty Gonzales, and Dave Temby, a veteran Defense Department bioweapons expert, called the suspect site list “toilet paper.” They had reached another disheartening conclusion: while weapons hunters were likely to continue uncovering remnants of chemical and biological munitions, suspect chemicals, and WMD precursors, they were unlikely to find stockpiles of modern unconventional weapons that administration officials claimed had posed the “grave threat” to America. We were gobsmacked.

  What we did not know then was that Saddam Hussein had been playing a double game: while he wanted the UN to believe that he had given up his WMD so that sanctions would be lifted, he also wanted Iran, Israel, and his other external and internal enemies to believe that he had kept those weapons. Moreover, as America’s top weapons analysts would later conclude, even Saddam wasn’t absolutely sure what was left in his stockpiles. At a Revolutionary Command Council meeting in October 2002, he had asked his senior staff whether “they might know something he did not about residual WMD stocks,” Charles Duelfer, America’s top Iraq weapons inspector, would write in 2013.3 But a decade earlier, as we were crisscrossing Iraq in search of the elusive WMD stockpiles and the scientists who had produced them, all we knew for certain was that the intelligence the XTF had been given about Iraq’s unconventional weapons was wrong. With this came the devastating realization that, as a result, some of my own earlier WMD stories were wrong, too.

  * * *

  I had not been wrong about Saddam, though. He was a mass murderer, a true psychopath. Sure, there were lots of bad people in the world, and some of them even led countries. It would have been folly for the United States to try to oust them all. But after years of reporting in the Middle East, I considered Saddam special.

  When I had first visited Iraq, in 1976, Saddam, not yet president, was already consolidating power. An American assistant secretary of state had described him at the time as a “rather remarkable person,” “very ruthless,” and a “pragmatic, intelligent power.”4 During my first visit to Baghdad, my suitcase was stolen. The incident would not have been noteworthy if I hadn’t been the only journalist covering two US senators on a visit chaperoned by US security officials and a large contingent of Iraqi uniformed and secret police. Although I was reporting for the Progressive, an obscure leftist midwestern monthly, the delegation had a high profile.

  I had seen my bag loaded onto a well-guarded van as we left for the airport. Still, someone, perhaps one of the many Iraqi “minders,” had been brazen or desperate enough to walk off with it. The incident w
as telling. If Saddam was trying to build a “new socialist Arab man”—secular, disciplined, marching confidently into an oil-rich future—this petty theft was not an encouraging start.

  The political climate deteriorated dramatically three years later in 1979, when Saddam assumed the Iraqi presidency in a characteristic bloodbath. He celebrated his inauguration in a giant hall in Baghdad by denouncing party members and even close friends whom he considered insufficiently loyal. As Saddam intoned their names one by one, the men were surrounded by goons and dragged out of the room. He had then called upon senior ministers, party leaders, and loyalists to form instant firing squads to kill their colleagues. After he had finished reading the list of the condemned, officials of the ruling Ba’ath Party who had not heard their names called wept openly with relief and began hysterically chanting in Arabic “Long Live Saddam!” “With our blood, with our souls,” they shouted, “we will sacrifice for you, O Saddam!” (It more or less rhymes in Arabic.)

  Years later, I would hear an audiotape of the astonishing assembly, the details of which Laurie Mylroie, a scholar at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and I would be among the first to describe in a book we wrote and published in 1990 just before the US-led liberation of Kuwait.5

  I had joined the Times in 1977 and became its Cairo bureau chief in 1983, responsible for covering most of the Arab Middle East. I traveled to Iraq more than a dozen times to cover the Iran-Iraq war and had grown to dread those visits. The war that Saddam had launched against neighboring Islamic Iran less than a year after becoming president was not turning out as he—or the CIA—had predicted. Though weak and internally divided, Iran’s revolutionary government, which in 1979 had ousted the Shah and created the world’s first militant Shiite Islamic state, was fighting back ferociously. Outgunned but not outmanned, given a population some three times that of Iraq, theocratic Iran seemed at times on the verge of defeating the secular state that Arabs regarded not only as the cradle of their civilization but also the “beating heart” of Arab nationalism.